Joseph Holler

jholler

Joseph Holler graduated from Ithaca College with majors in anthropology, computer science and media studies.  He first sought to integrate his diverse interests by joining the Peace Corps to teach math and information technology in Tanzanian secondary schools.  He first discovered GIS at the end of his two year Peace Corps assignment, and applied to the geography PhD and interdisciplinary NSF fellowship in GIS at the University at Buffalo.  Together, economic geography and GIS at Buffalo held promise to help explain and address the causes behind extreme global disparities and incomes.  Joseph returned to Tanzania to mix quantitative, qualitative, and spatial methods for his dissertation research on vulnerability and adaptation to climate change on Mount Kilimanjaro.  He modeled processes of social adaptation, finding that adaptation normally produces inequitable social outcomes.  Furthermore, he identifies the most significant social and environmental determinants that constrain or enable adaptation.

Joseph was attracted to Middlebury’s problem-based GIS curriculum and the opportunity to develop a new upper-level GIS methods course.  During his dissertation fieldwork in Tanzania, he regretted using proprietary software and data sources beyond the economic means of the communities he worked in, so he proposed to teach GEOG 328: GIS for Developing Countries.  The course would use free and open source software and data to research problems of environmental and demographic change.  Students were challenged to propose semester-long research projects for sites in developing countries, acquire and prepare data, learn and apply open-source software techniques, and critically reflect on the use of open GIS for research in developing countries.  Students in the first edition of the course gained confidence in doing research and solving difficult technical problems, and many have already gone on to use GIS in senior theses, summer internships, and new jobs.

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